The Archenemies Of Great Salesmen Are Truth And Reality — Right Mr. Trump?

Great salesmen are born not made. Whether it is “tycoon” Trump selling real-estate dreams to the well-heeled or political nonsense to the American Public, or it is playwright Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman character in Death of a Salesman, there is something both heroic and pathetic about great salesmen. They’re work and feeling of self-worth is built around a cult of personality.

Their job is to spin stores, any story that gets to an end result — the sale — truth and reality be damned. When it comes to basic sales jobs, like selling life insurance, many make a stab at it but few make a successful career out of it.

For some the job is relentlessly boring. For others it feels degrading and empty, knowing full well that a majority of the people that one approaches views salesmen like they carry the plague. It is thus a chronic tenfold rejection rate against which successful salesmen must be psychological insulated.

Still, It has been said that the easiest person to con is another con, a self-con. So assuming that around around 40% of the public can be classified as political or religious fundamentalist, folks who pray as much for their daily deception as they do for their daily bread, all is not against making the sale.

Now being insulated from truth and reality may be a valuable characteristic for great salesmen making the sale, when, however, it comes to actually running a business it can often prove disastrous. For instance time after time Donald J. Trump has fallen flat on his face as a businessman and ended up in bankruptcy, owing hundreds of millions of dollars to banks that he suckered into bad loans.

Of course we know that the Donald can even sell snowballs to some not so bright snowmen, and if he would have stuck to purely the selling aspect of a business many casinos would, today, still be in business. But as we also know, Trump’s overpowering egocentrism tells him he can do it all.

And now, alas, his overblown sense of expertise somehow has managed, through the mysteries of the Elector College, to convince the requisite number of folks that he ought to be America’s top bullshit salesman. The wreckage this time of Trump’s salesmanship, sad to say, could be a lot worse than the mere bankruptcy of a nation.